09.03.11

There’s the level of the specific problem. For example: this sequences of graphics calls causes a crash.

Then there’s the level of the meta-bug: a bug tracking a number of different issues in some genre. For example, there might be a bug tracking, say, crashes involving some particular feature: graphics drawing functionality, for example. In Bugzilla this is known as a “meta-bug”, because it isn’t really a bug but rather a bug about bugs. In b.m.o such bugs are given the meta keyword.

Last, there’s the level consisting of bugs which track meta-bugs. For example, you might have a bug tracking a bug for crashes involving graphics drawing functionality, a bug for rendering glitches involving graphics drawing functionality, a bug for unimplemented functionality in the specification, a bug for performance problems involving graphics drawing functionality, and a bug tracking progress at investigating the relative stability of graphics functionality run on hardware with various graphics cards and driver versions. The logical progression is to call this a “meta-meta-bug”.

Therefore, shouldn’t Bugzilla have a meta-meta keyword to associate with such bugs? But let’s not be over-hasty: let’s have a fair discussion first. Perhaps people should comment or blog about this idea a bit. What do readers think?

Ugh, no. Meta bugs about meta bugs are still, themselves, meta bugs, so “meta” is still accurate. Also, if you want “meta-meta”, then by the same arguments you need “meta-meta-meta” for the even-fewer third-level bugs, which is clearly silly.

There are few enough of these multi-level meta bugs that I don’t see why a separate keyword is valuable.